In today's modern world, individuals use many forms of digital communications (email, chat, texting, etc). The sheer volume of these communications can be overwhelming, leading to cluttered inboxes, and making it difficult for busy professionals to locate important communications and/or to respond timely and appropriately. Conventional email management tools attempt to organize one's inbox by sorting the emails based on predefined criteria, for example by date, sender, or by flags manually entered by a user. However this requires a user to think about what information to enter (importance, date to follow up by, subject headings) or to consider what keywords to include to allow for subsequent search and retrieval.
However, this takes time and effort on the part of the user, and an overwhelmed professional who has a very full inbox will tend to rush to respond to deal with such an inbox, leading to failures to correctly enter the appropriate information to allow for subsequent retrieval. Further such rushed communication tends to result in email messages without well formatted text. Email messages often contain:                Weak sentence structure        Missing punctuation and poor capitalization        Slang and colloquialisms        Bullets, tables, emoticons, etc.        
This hinders the ability for conventional tools to be able to locate and classify particular communications, which can adversely affect both the sender and the recipient. This can exacerbate the problem, making it even more time consuming and more difficult to prioritize important and urgent communications and tasks.
Further, in these communications, the communicator (also known as the “sender”, or “author”) may semantically refer to one or more digital artifacts (also known as a “computer files”, or simply “files”) that may or may not be included as part of the communication. It is up to the reader of the communication to understand the communicator's semantic reference and then correlate it with a particular artifact, or artifacts.
However, this takes time and effort on the part of the recipient. An overwhelmed professional with a large collection of artifacts may spend an objectionable amount of time attempting to correlate and find a particular digital artifact.
There is a need for a system which can automatically identify when a communicator is referencing a digital artifact, and when appropriate, assist a recipient in resolving that reference to a particular digital artifact, or when ambiguous, a set of candidate artifacts that best match the context of the reference. These artifacts may be included with that communication, and/or included with a previous communication, and/or stored in an archive that is available to the system user.
There is a need for a system which can automatically understand the nature of a communication and assist users in prioritizing and responding to a variety of communications from a multiple sources.